Where you able to log in to a TTY session?
All bazzite images support 'gaming mode'. The deck images boot into it straight away which could cause problems with desktop hardware.
Consider joining the ublue discord group and troubleshooting with the creators of bazzite in the bazzte channel. They are very knowledgeable and if your issue is reproducible they would be able to implement a fix in future images.
The flatpak leaks, a VPN is one of the situations were layering with rpm-ostree is appropriate